Awhile back I was employed at a large candy factory working an assembly line. The machine processed over a ton of candy per 8 hour shift and it was my job to touch each piece with two fingers to give it a swirl. Physically it wasn't nothing, mentally, I swear I lost 10 IQ points each night I worked there.

Fish market, summer between grade 11 and grade 12 (between Junior and Senior year, I guess most would call it).

Try having a social life when even after you come home and shower with half a bottle of lemon juice and two kinds of soap and still smell faintly of fish.

I'll never forget the first time I had to cut up a large groundfish either. And you thought the bandsaw was only for shopclass...(unless you've worked in a slaughterhouse, in which case I'm sure you've got stories to tell me).

A few years ago, I spent a summer working as a labourer on the university research farms. The first day, I got sunstroke. It got a little better from there, but it was still weeks of harvesting barley by hand, measuring stalks, tying bags, weighing samples... it sucked. But not as bad as what the rest of you have said so far. And at least they paid tolerably and kept me around for as long as they promised, unlike the computer school I taught at before that.

While I was an undergrad, I worked night shift in a hospital pharmacy. Most of the time the job was great because I got paid to do homework while sitting in the Pharmacy Director's chair in front of an antiquated computer running an antiquated DOS program in order to make sure that the program didn't hang because of a misplaced or missing decimal point. On the other hand, being up in the ER the night two school buses and a semi collided on I-65 would rank number 3 on my personal list of the worst days ever. (Numbers 1 and 2 being when my mother passed away and when my college roommate committed suicide by jumping off our roof.)

Clean up at a seafood inspection lab. Cleaning surimi off the ban saw was the worst, that stuff turned into faintly fishy concrete when it dried out. The lab was always heated up to 85 degrees or so to help thaw out the samples for the next day's work, but I had to weave and dodge across a forklift filled wherehouse to take the day's remnants to a giant container in a -30 degree freezer. I got a lot of colds. I also discovered that -30 degrees is cold enough for bad squid to freeze on contact with the floor.

Telemarketing. Cold calling for a carpet cleaning company. The guy ran it out of his house, so it was a little room filled with people who all smoked, all the time, and we were all paid under the table. Pretty mild compared to some of you, but I sure didn't enjoy it.

I worked for { Sorry, you must be logged in to see this text! } during the dotcom boom (before they were bought out & turned into { Sorry, you must be logged in to see this text! } ).

It's was a music website where you could read album reviews, watch exclusive artist interviews, and listen to this streaming music broadcasting thing called { Sorry, you must be logged in to see this text! } . You couldnt tell Lc what songs to play, but you could tell it what genre to play, then rate each song/album/artist that came up randomly & your rating would control how often you heard that song/album/artist, or you could tell it not to play any songs containing profanity. Thats where I came in.

My job was to listen to CD's all day long looking for bad words, drug/gun references, etc., then check off the songs on a big excel sheet so the system would know what songs not to include on people's playlists. The first couple days werent too bad, just really slow. The rap CD's went by fast, because they would usually cuss right away so I could just check them off the list & move onto the next album/song. But the *death metal, country, and alternative music was pretty awful because I had to listen to those CDs all the way through just in case someone decided to cuss at the last second of a song. Each day of doing that felt like a whole week had gone by.

I was fired after a few months when someone finally discovered that the hours that I recorded on my timesheet didnt quite match the hours I actually spent at work. Ahem.

*My appologies to any fans of death metal, country, or alternative music.

Stockroom at Target. Almost completely mindless work -- just trundle around where your little scanner tells you to go, and either put stuff on shelves or take stuff off shelves. Plus the fun of hauling heavy boxes down wobbly ladders while hoping I don't lose my balance and do the Mick Foley Memorial Nestea Plunge onto the bare concrete below.

Slinging chicken at Boston Market. You do not know incompetence until you work the drive-thru, during the dinner rush, when the assistant manager on duty neglects to make enough chicken. And turkey. Oh, and ham and meatloaf. Guess those half-hour drive-thru averages punched his neurotic ass out.

Similar to telemarketing: MARKET RESEARCH. During the year I did that, I came down with strep throat four times.

...I've graduated to a higher level of call centre work since then, but the memories of those dumb ASCII terminals and the curry-esque B.O. of the guy in the booth beside me still haunts me from time to time.

While in high school I worked pizza delivery/dish washing (and whatever misc. crap jobs they could come up with) for a local eatery. They had apparently the widest delivery range...and the worst tippers.

Anyhow...our manager was a mean drunk...who by the end of most nights was either passed out, or firing someone in a drunken rage. My last night there, our only other remaining driver went out for a delivery...and never came back. He was arrested for drunk driving/driving with a suspended license.

The manager decided to blame me (wtf??) for this...so I decided to quit.

...the only benefit to this job was knowing the pizza chef...we could get him to purposely screw up an order that we'd have to bring back. We got to eat the mistakes!

Convenience store manager. 100+ hour weeks, crap pay, night shifts employees quitting (over the phone at 1am, leaving the store empty for as long as it took me to get there), calls at 3am reporting an armed robbery, crap pay, working every holiday, paperwork, drunk people demanding Mad Dog Kiwi Cherry at 4am, crap pay, jerk district manager, only having one other employee at the store for a 3 month stretch, crap pay, having to allow moms give their 4 kids a one-dollar food stamp each to pay for a piece of gum while she takes the 95 cents change from each to buy her Thunderbird, and finally, meager wages.

Also telemarketing. In Las Vegas, I got my first job at 16. It was really bad anyways, with me calling unsuspecting senior citizens trying to get them to spend 800 dollars for vitamins. They could win a great prize though (yes, everyone got the tennis bracelet before you ask). After half a week, I was fired for both my inability to generate any sales, and because I figured out how much of a scam it was and didn't want any part of it.

When I got the check for two thirds of a week of work (162 dollars), I also got up and went back to beg for my job back.